Thinking Parallel

A Blog on Parallel Programming and Concurrency by Michael Suess

Archive for 2006/09

Recursive locks – a blessing or a curse?

Christopher Smith has tried very hard to come up with a case where a recursive lock is a good thing (TM). And while the article is very well thought out and presented, apparently David Butenhof (the creator of my favorite book on POSIX Threads) disagrees. Actually, it was the other way around, as Butenhofs article […]

Stream processing for the Masses? I don’t think so!

Joe from scalability.org points to an interesting article. Apparently, ATI is moving into the field of stream processing. In this post, I will tell you a little about what stream processing is, what your graphics processor has to do with it and also what problems I see with it. But let me start by having […]

How to do it ONCE in OpenMP…

Time to write about some of the things I am doing at work again. As you may remember from my last article related to work, I am presently toying around with OpenMP and C++, trying to implement commonly used patterns there. What I want to write about today is not exactly a pattern, but rather […]

Sometimes, it IS the compilers fault!

I am writing this quick note, because today I wasted at least an hour looking for a bug in my code, when it was really a bug in the compiler. And when I like something even less than bugs, its wasted time :x. Therefore, I will repeat my simple advice to myself here, to make […]

Mutual Exclusion with Locks – an Introduction

Do you know the difference between a mutex and a spinlock? You know exactly what kind of locks are employed in e.g. OpenMP? You find hierarchical locks boring and recursive spinlocks only make you yawn? Then you will most likely NOT enjoy reading this article, and I encourage you to stop reading now, as it […]

Language Discussions

There have been various articles on the merits of different programming languages, both parallel and sequential, during the last week (notice how elegantly I have avoided the term language wars 😉 ): Joel has written about which (sequential) programming language to use for web-programming. He primarily compares Java and .NET, along with a little bit […]